On this episode of Previously Unknown, two guest experts discuss the critical importance of digital publishing for art historical scholarship. David Newbury joins us from Getty and Elizabeth Gorayeb from the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc., a non-profit that produces online catalog raisonné projects for artists including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Romare Bearden.
David Newbury is the Assistant Director, Software and UX, at Getty, where he works with cultural heritage professionals, researchers, scientists, and technologists to find common solutions to technical and scholarly problems. In this capacity, he leads the team responsible for public-facing software, APIs, and research applications such as the Getty Vocabularies and the Getty Museum collection. Previous projects include Art Tracks, a provenance project at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the American Art Collaborative, working with 14 museums on standardizing models and software around linked data. He has previously worked with Carnegie Mellon, the University of British Columbia, University of Illinois, and PBS. David is also the current president of MCN and on the executive committee for the IIIF Consortium.
Elizabeth Gorayeb is Executive Director of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc., non-profit art historical research foundation based in New York. For over two decades, Ms. Gorayeb has specialized in art historical research on the provenance and attribution of 19th and 20th century works of art. As the senior vice president in the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Sotheby’s for many years, she led high-profile research efforts in matters of restitution, valuation, and authentication, and she continues to work as an independent consultant in this capacity today. In 2016, Ms. Gorayeb was appointed as the founding Executive Director of the WPI, which is dedicated to the accessibility and digitization of art historical information, including digital catalogue raisonné projects for artists including Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Tom Wesselmann, and Romare Bearden. In her capacity as director of WPI, she organizes conferences and lectures internationally on artists’ legacy preservation and provenance research. She has also been an invited speaker at Columbia Law School, New York; The American Bar Association, Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires; The Appraisers Association of America, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Royal Academy of Arts, London; and National Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Ms. Gorayeb is also on the Board of Directors of the Fonds WPI in Paris, and serves on the advisory board of the Helsinki-based non-profit, Nordic Art Intelligence. In addition to being a AAA Certified Member of the Appraisers Association of America, she holds a B.A. from Wellesley College, and an M.A. from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Ms. Gorayeb lives with her family in New York City.